


Et ades sera l'alba

by Lilliburlero



Category: David Blaize - E. F. Benson
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Asexuality, Gratuitous Troubadours, Hand Jobs, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Masturbation, Minor Character Death, Oral Sex, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-Canon, Proportionally Less Nudity Than Canon Probably, Sexual Fantasy, Stealth Crossover, Vaguely Swinburnean Blowjobs, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-20
Updated: 2016-02-20
Packaged: 2018-05-21 07:54:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6043942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Frank and David engage in certain circumscribed demonstrations of physical love. Well, there's a war on.</p><p>*</p><p>Note: asexual but not sex-repulsed character having sex, BDSM fantasy, inexplicit reference to underage sex at an English public school with its usual consent issues, internalized homophobia, Frank Maddox being his own exhaustive list of content warnings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Et ades sera l'alba

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [disenchanted](http://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted) for beta-reading and putting out my appalling Frangloop to a third-party Frenchpicker. Any remaining errors are my own.
> 
> _For those who prefer accuracy &c._
> 
> In the temporally-flexible Blaiziverse, the First World War doesn't seem to happen, with _David Blaize_ being nominally set after the death of Queen Victoria and before 1914, but _really_ , the reader senses, in Benson's own 1870s youth. The sequel, _David of King's_ , though it follows the characters' lives almost directly from the first book, has a somewhat desultory early 1920s setting, including flappers and Russian emigrés. My dissatisfaction with this state of affairs seems to have produced the headcanon that David and Frank's relationship became sexual at some point during the war years (and though it endured as a partnership didn't stay that way), which I've alluded to in a couple of other fics. This story isn't quite compatible with those allusions in its details. I've also taken the liberty of ignoring the inessential 20s setting _David of King's_ , assuming that David takes his degree in the summer of 1914.

During the war it became their custom to kiss upon meeting and parting. David initiated it, for Frank had from a childhood filled with solemn Gallic custom flinched from the salutatory embraces of his own sex. It was an unmanly aversion, unknown to the Homeric and Arthurian heroes as to the authors of the Psalms and the Sonnets, but until his second term at Marchester he had taken some delusive heart from it. Whereupon a rufous sixth-form eccentric, whom a gold medal in the Boys’ Foil at Aldershot had elevated to somewhat precarious divinity, had proved beyond doubt and at drowsy, sun-dappled length that the source of Frank’s recoil was located in consanguinity and the disagreeable texture of side-whiskers.

In those days David wore a clipped, narrow moustache, which was not disagreeable to feel against one’s upper lip, though nor did it seem quite to belong to its owner. That first time, Frank forgot delight and disquiet alike in a sudden recollection of the girl in the Kipling story and her opinions upon moustache-wax, and so found himself addressing a reedy ‘Cheerio’ to a back already more than half turned. David gave a chipped-toothed grin over his shoulder, his eyes hooded with anxiety. A good egg, Frank thought obscurely, was not necessarily improved by condiments. 

War was a reasonably effective distraction from prolonged consideration of exactly how fraternally David had meant a pressure four or five seconds in duration of lips not quite dry, though it was the sort of thing that could ambush a chap over a basin of lukewarm shaving water or a B.104-82 and be damnably difficult to relegate to the mind’s lumber-room. More recalcitrant still was the thought that David’s uncertain, wounded smile might be the last of his he’d ever see. 

By the time this latter fear had been proved groundless, Frank had rationalised the kiss as purely brotherly and done his best to put it out of mind. They met in the bar of the Adelphi Theatre and consumed pink gins, whiskery cutlets and grey legumes at ruinous expense, followed by an inane musical farce, the action of which―a youth of nineteen, obliged by his mother’s exercise of her prerogative of subtracting five years from her age to do the same, leading his magistrate step-father riotously astray in a nightclub―roused in Frank a dull sense of personal unease. It rushed in upon him again as he latched and bolted the door of the house in Lexham Gardens, feeling David hovering redundantly behind him. 

‘Hullo, Frank. Shall we say hullo properly?’ 

Frank had kissed the boys whom he seduced at school. He had kissed Davies and Carruthers and Windham and Cameron and Marlow L. and Marlow P.A. (no relation), Hannay and Fleming and Mansell and Mansel (cousins), Maunsell and Anderson and Heath and those others whose names he could not now remember. He’d kissed Hughes. One murky November afternoon, in the bathroom, fully clothed and with his kettle dangling from his fingers, he had almost kissed David, who was naked except for the towel draped in his lap, when he’d perceived David’s innocence not as mere absence of vice but as a positive, resilient entity, and been overwhelmed by shame and grief at his own corruption. A perfunctory kiss sometimes opened the seedy, perilous transactions that had constituted the whole of his sexual life since. And now he was about to kiss David in the cool, dim hall of his mother’s South Kensington maisonette, tactfully vacated until Saturday morning. 

When he had taken his leave of her, last time, she had said, ‘Quand cette guerre sale sera terminée, installes-toi dans le pays gouverné par le code Napoléon. Je te praie.’ 

He laughed lightly and replied, as he had not since his last year at prep school, in English. ‘I swear, Maman, that’s the most singular adieu I ever heard. And awful rot, you know. The common law is the cornerstone of our freedoms.’ 

‘Ne plaisantes pas, François. Pour des hommes tels que toi, il n’y a pas de liberté en Angleterre.’ 

‘Can’t imagine what you mean. Native and to the manner born. Goodbye, Mother.’ 

David had not taken to moustache-wax, and his lips were firm and warm. There could be no mistaking his meaning this time, though this embrace lasted barely longer than the other, and that brevity was Frank’s doing, for he drew back the fraction that is a request to make a closed-mouthed kiss an open-mouthed one. David’s eyes grew suddenly wide. 

‘The―the maids?’ 

‘Given a holiday. Maman thinks it most important to satisfy convention where the chances of it being outraged are nil.’ 

‘She’s right, as always.’ 

‘The char will come in to ‘do’ in the mornings, but otherwise we’re camping until Saturday. I hope you don’t mind.’ 

‘No, it’ll be just like―’ His hands dropped from Frank’s shoulders. 

‘What?’ 

‘Oh Frank, I was going to say _like school_.’ 

‘Well, so it shall, but no con and no wretched football. And we can smoke, and put rum in our cocoa. Speaking of, I’ll make some. You go into the drawing room and light the fire. Mrs P. will have set it, you’ll just have to throw a match on. I'll lug our kit as well―you're in the usual bedroom, of course.’ 

David smiled gratefully, then a flicker of mischief entered his eye. ‘Thanks awfully, Maddox.’ 

* 

‘I say,’ David said, turning as Frank entered with a tray, ‘your mother’s dainty things always did make me feel a clumsy oaf. But now it’s as if we’ve requisitioned the place, look.’ 

And amid the rose glass and ormulu, the beads and lace of the drawing room, David’s belt and his immense boots, which lay discarded before the fender, his khaki-clad limbs sprawled over the pale blue velvet of the sofa, seemed indeed an occupying force. Frank set down his burden and grinned. ‘Shove up, Blazes, there’s a good kid.’ 

They drank cocoa laced with the cook’s rum and talked of the privations and improvisations of war, its longueurs and shortcuts, the idiocies and idiosyncracies of the Other Ranks, of adjutants and forms and drafts, of forms and quartermasters and stores. They swilled the cocoa dregs with rum, drank the muddy result with every appearance of satisfaction, and lit cigarettes. Frank told a farcical story about a captain whose notorious wife showed up at base camp, having travelled to France _sans_ passport, _sans_ papers, _sans_ everything except a document for him to sign that turned out to require no signature and a filthy beast of a major, whereupon she proceeded to tell his―the captain’s―C.O. that he was a Socialist and a religious maniac, then inveigle him―her husband―out to a hotel in Rouen, all looking-glass and white-painted wickerwork, where in the meantime she’d picked up a drunken general, so that about three in the morning there came a rattle at the doorhandle of his wife’s bedroom, and it ended with both the major and the general reeling half-conscious and bleeding in the corridor. 

‘The astonishing bit,’ he concluded, ‘was he still got the draft off, only about six hours late. Extraordinary chap. Damnably ugly, though, and bad breath, though that’s not his―lungs, you know―’ 

David countered with an anecdote of an Irishman's narrow escape from arrest for the circulation of verses which probably (on balance) _had_ just about ducked the bar of sedition, because Capt. Blaize had found himself entirely helpless at the rhyme of ‘God and country’ with ‘all and sundry.’ The conversation that ensued sometimes ran them against the truly unspeakable things, the fear and suffering, the pity and sorrow; from these they cast off, sharing the quick, confident looks of competent amateurs. Unpatriotically reckless, they threw more coal on and enjoyed the democratic sensation of smoking in their shirt-sleeves, drinking neat rum from rum-rinsed cups. David yawned, wriggling his stockinged toes and stretching his arms to their full span, so that his right hand fell on the back of the sofa, just behind and between Frank’s shoulder-blades. They sat and smoked in silence. 

‘Margy said to me once―I’d like to say I was about the age when you took me to task for acting the goat, but it was quite a few years after, I’m ashamed to tell―I’d been beastly to the housemaid about something, I forget what. That it wasn’t so much that the chores were hard work in themselves, though sometimes they were, it was knowing that one had to do them over the next day. It’s like that, isn’t it?’ 

‘Yes,’ said Frank colourlessly, ‘it’s like that.’ The hand at his back made a small scuffle of invitation. Exhausted and yearning, he very nearly accepted it without demur, without question, without even a look. He daren’t look. But he could, and must, offer comfort. He rubbed the bridge of his nose and patted the side of his leg. ‘No, ‘s all right. But you me, ‘f you like.’ 

David swung about with his customary untutored grace, settling his nape on Frank’s left thigh. He lay there peaceably, closing his eyes for minutes at a time, as Frank’s combing fingers wreaked entire disorder upon hair cropped just at the point it began to curl. _Gently dip, _he thought, letting the action become mechanical,_ but not too deep._

David moved his head from side to side. His eyes, opening in the dim light of the fire and a single table-lamp, were a startlingly deep marine blue. ‘Don’t let’s―I mean, I don’t want to be. Alone.’ 

‘You’re not. You shan’t be.’ 

David clutched at Frank’s shirt-front and loosened tie, drawing him down towards his parted lips. It was a horribly clumsy kiss, the clumsiest in all the infinite annals of kisses, spittle-specked and tooth-jarring. Frank realised that the last person he had kissed deeply like this, with both affection and the intention of giving pleasure, had been _Hughes_. He disposed of the thought as an orderly might a field dressing horrendously soiled. David had probably never kissed anyone―as a lover does―at all. It was insupportable, impossible. It couldn’t go on. 

He straightened abruptly. ‘Look here, sit up―’ 

David, who had decorously closed his eyes, opened them again in agonised apology. ‘I’m _sorry_. I thought you―' 

Frank shoved blindly at his left shoulder. ‘No―hell, _Christ_. Just bloody well sit up―’ 

Blinking and scuffling his heels against the hearthrug, David obeyed. Frank leaned across to take his right forearm. ‘ _Alors, bien―mon chèri―maintenant―comme_ ça.’ 

They kissed for rather a long time, intoxicated by novelty. The first time with someone new, Frank remembered, it always felt like you’d invented the thing and you could never want anything more than it. _New_ was a damned queer thing to think about David― _David_. Frank had some time ago revised his opinion of David’s innocence: innocent he certainly was, but innocent as Blake’s orphans, sweeps and Little Black Boy are, that know the worst the world has to give and face it sweetly stern. He had seen it that November afternoon in the bathroom, and his intuition not to touch it was sound, but he had wasted many hours in futile self-reproach before he had understood that he was a presumptuous fool to think he _could_ have touched it. Now David was not a fourteen-year-old schoolboy but a man of four-and-twenty, the gap of age and rank was closed to the point of overlap, for David had been gazetted before him, and he, not Frank, had started this. And yet. What Frank’s apish groping could not hope to reach the bloody hand of war might yet have gained, and defiled. 

‘Frank?’ 

‘Mm―?’ 

‘Are you all right?’ 

‘Couldn’t be better. Why?’ 

‘You went stiff suddenly. I mean, your shoulders did.’ Frank saw in the creases around David’s eyes and heard in his inflexion that he’d meant that, and wondered at the sheer good humour that banished smut from it. ‘Did I do something wrong?’ 

Frank caught his breath. David’s ingenuous frown had always melted him, and now it was augmented by hair set on end by Frank’s caresses and a slow flush rising from the collar that Frank had loosened. (Even the moustache had its charms, which were, oddly enough, roughly those of the best hotel in Rouen. Well, what of it? It was a very nice hotel.) Frank’s unregenerate self longed to seize him, strip him, use him roughly as his basest urges directed, knowing that he would encounter no protest, as he would have encountered none a decade ago. With a perfect instinct for sabotage of his own impulses, well-honed on the bleak steel of those ten years, Frank found himself gulping, ‘Good God, no. It was just―look, are you sure?’ 

David stroked Frank’s cheek and nodded. ‘Yes. I’ve thought about it quite a bit. It’s a torment for you, isn’t it, doing without? You deserve to have someone you can turn to. Someone you can trust.’ 

‘But―you? Do you want to? Because you know, if you _don’t_ , I _can’t_. It would be filthy and miserable. It would ruin things. And, you know, I never got the idea that you did. Not before tonight, anyway. And even then―’ 

David pouted, ferociously and stubbornly earnest. Frank cursed his scruples, close to groaning aloud at the thought of the applications those lips might have in the absence of Maddox’s Outsize Conscience. 

‘I thought you of all people would understand. There are different ways of wanting. I don’t, not like most chaps do―no, Frank, do let me jaw a minute. This is important.’ He settled Frank’s head on his shoulder with a husbandly authority which Frank was too bemused to resent. ‘I don’t, as I said. Very occasionally, a sort of a twinge. But it goes off almost straight away. That’s not how it is for you, or for most men―most _people_. Women―look, hang on, I’ll come to women in a sec. At first I was inclined to congratulate myself, and then I looked around and it occurred to me it was a very fugitive and cloistered virtue indeed. And so I thought, well, I’m just lucky, and when the right girl presents herself it’ll all fit into place.’ 

‘She―it―still might,’ Frank said, self-punishingly. 

‘I suppose so. But I don’t honestly see how, not when you consider all the legwork men have to do to get married,’ David said. The brusque, strangled note in his voice was familiar to Frank from conversations about Bags’s lamentable taste for romance, but it had been much exercised, he guessed, by three years of typical mess and dug-out conversation, and now sounded almost brutal. He heard a phrase such as _Rather an old misogynist, aren’t you, Blaize, what?_ and the knowing whinny of subaltern laughter. ‘Girls _don’t_ present themselves, that’s the point,’ David continued. ‘Not the marrying sort of girl. And the other sort―not even a twinge. No, once a twinge, but never mind.’ 

Frank squirmed in physical suppression of curiosity and jealousy. David’s enclosing arm tightened and he pressed his lips into Frank’s hair. ‘I didn’t even speak to her. I’ll tell you―not now,’ he murmured. 

‘A lot of women―’ Frank said roughly, wondering why he was letting this farce go on, and at the same time knowing exactly, ‘would be grateful for―someone, someone like you.’ 

David chuckled. ‘I wouldn’t be so sure. They say things when I’m around, you know. Apparently I give off this great sense of consideration and safety, like the sedate sort of pony that wouldn’t _dream_ of lying down and rolling on his rider. I say, I could do with a cigarette. You?’ 

‘I think I’d better have _something_ ,’ Frank said ungraciously, lifting his head and freeing David’s arm. 

Bending forward for the cigarettes, David said, with a lightly concealed bravado, ‘Haven’t you been listening, my dear? You can have me.’ All the same, when he straightened again, extending the box to Frank, there was a bright cerise spot on each of his cheekbones. 

Frank had never before heard David speak so racily, so _consciously_ ; disgust and arousal contended briefly before, as it always did, the latter subdued the former into its service. Only the cigarette between his lips, to which David held a courteous match, prevented him from snatching him by the scruff of his neck for a swift, untender kiss before giving an order to take down his breeches, bend over the arm of the sofa― 

‘Don’t talk such rot, David. It’s beneath you, and it makes a thorough beast of me.’ 

‘But that’s what you want, isn’t it? In a queer sort of way?’ 

‘What the bloody hell do you mean by that?’ 

David looked at him, drawing steadily on his cigarette. 

‘You’ve an infernal cheek, if you are what you say you are, and knowing what I am, even to think you have a notion how I feel―and to offer me a kind of passionless charade? It may come as something of a surprise to you, but I do have some self-respect.’ He made to stand up and deciding against it as an excess of demonstrativeness, impotently crossed and uncrossed his legs. 

‘I’m sorry.’ David exhaled two shapely smoke rings. ‘I only meant―you do sort of cherish an idea of yourself as whiffing of brimstone, and you don’t, not a bit.’ 

‘ _Cherish_?’ 

‘But,’ David went on hurriedly, ‘you’re mistaken, you see, in _passionless_. You’re right, I can’t understand how it is from your side. But people like you―normal people, if I can put it like that,’ his lips twitched perilously, ‘who desire physical love, are apt to exalt it rather.’ 

‘Exalt―’ Frank spluttered into a hacking cough. David clapped him impersonally on the back. 

‘Queer, isn’t it, when it’s supposed to be so base? But you do, all of you: you’re convinced it’s the strongest of all human wishes. But if you weigh it sensibly, the evidence just isn’t there, you know. There are heaps of things that people want more, even the types who want _it_ as well. Power, chiefly. Anyway, the important thing is that I want your happiness just as passionately, if that’s the word we’re using, just as recklessly, just as _criminally_ , as you want my―’ the spots, which had almost faded away, reappeared with a pink vengeance, and he made a top-to-toe gesture with the hand that held his cigarette. ‘And if you don’t believe it, try me.’ 

Frank, somewhat recovered from his coughing fit, was nonetheless dumbfounded. ‘I―’ he wheezed eventually, stubbing his cigarette, ‘I never thought of it like that.’ 

‘Well, you wouldn’t, would you?’ David said, only a trifle complacently. 

‘But―doesn’t it disgust you? Mad in pursuit and in possession so, kind of thing?’ 

David shook his head, reaching over for the ashtray. ‘No. That was written by a sufferer. It did, at one time―you know when, of course. The Head of Helmsworth told me I ought to be―one of those little valedictory jaws, you know, and he talked so well about Keats I believed him until quite recently. But not now. Not with you. I can’t absolutely promise I shan’t giggle, though. You won’t hate me if I giggle sometimes?’ 

‘Oh― _David_. I’m not sure I can keep from it myself.’ 

Indeed he could not, and snorting helplessly, they fell again into each another’s arms. 

As the paroxysm receded, David’s expression grew fond; Frank understood that despair was a component in his offer, and desperation was another, as they were often also in mentions in despatches. The tender of vulnerability made him both more and less inclined to accept. 

‘Shall I come to your bedroom? Or have we jawed too much to make it―’ David gulped an unintelligible adjective, ‘for you?’ 

‘If we’re to do this without hurt or offence, or without much, we’re going to have to stick a lot more jaw than we’re accustomed to. Come. Yes, come.’ 

David had bounded up, dropped a kiss on his forehead and disappeared down the corridor before Frank realised that the sort of bawdy rejoinder he could have expected from almost anyone else hadn’t been made, and how very much he liked it, for the least noble reasons imaginable. Knowing that if he stood too quickly the drawing-room would spin and blot, he put his head between his knees and drew an enormous racking breath that ended in a slow, sobbing laugh. 

* 

Frank found himself unusually glad of the patent gas stove his mother had installed in his bedroom during her last convulsive bout of modernity. A crouching cylinder of perforated iron, glowing dimly and leaching oxygen at a rate greater than it supplied heat, it at least―if one remembered to light it, which, with a sybaritic concern for his own comfort, he had before putting the cocoa on, meaning that he could now turn the wretched thing _off_ ―made lolling naked on one’s bed late in an English autumn less than an entire impossibility. 

He had never waited for someone before. He was the one who came, who crept, who tapped and whispered. David had no need to be furtive, could enter with a title almost spousal― _Christ_ , he’d be imagining him in chiffon and ostrich feathers next. He squeezed his cock, gave it a couple of deft, useful strokes. David’s penetrating whistle sounded at the door. 

‘Come in!’ 

David was wearing pink-striped flannel pyjamas and a brown woollen dressing-gown of aggressively utilitarian aspect. He closed the door firmly behind him. He advanced to the centre of the bedside rug, a tattered Isfahan that was one of the household’s few Maddox relics, and observed Frank with attentive gravity. Frank stared back defiantly; to have left off touching himself, he had thought, would be timid and dishonest alike, and now he was stuck with it. 

‘You’re―beautiful,’ David said softly. ‘I never dared look properly before.’ 

‘ _Really_? You mean you―you―after all?’ 

David’s face creased into something that was very nearly exasperation, and he looked down at the rug’s etiolated orange and crimson. ‘No. It doesn’t mean I don’t see beauty, Frank. You taught me how―’ 

‘Forget it. Let me look at you.’ 

This at least could be done without unease, for David had always delighted in Frank’s approbation of his physique, and a certain sensual appreciation of his peacocking was a pleasure Frank permitted himself. 

David loosened the cords of dressing-gown and trousers, pulled the pyjama shirt boyishly over his head. The skin that Frank had last seen golden-brown was slug-pale except where it was weathered and chapped; an indifferent diet, taken more often than not at irregular hours, had hollowed and pouched a torso that in the summer of 1914 had been as severely lovely as the Kritian Boy’s. His buttocks were peppered with pimples; a livid depression the size of a small child’s palm on the side of his right thigh commemorated the otherwise-trustworthy agent whose neural peculiarity caused him to produce maps of enemy lines both photographically detailed and back-to-front; his shins were dented by the perpetual quarrel of the British soldier with the fire step, his feet disfigured by hard skin and yellowed, friable toenails. That Frank’s well-schooled eyes had automatically passed over what was now permitted to his gaze was an irony not lost on him; when he raised and focussed them he found that David had taken himself in hand. He had one of those members unremarkable in quiescence but quite splendid aroused: not over-large, but straight, high-coloured and plump. Frank steadied his breath, and rather than excite himself further, cupped his balls in one hand. 

‘Do you―I mean, do you often?’ 

‘Sometimes. Doesn’t everybody?’ 

‘But what do you think about?’ 

David paused and shifted his weight onto his left hip. ‘Why, Frank, I think of you.’ 

‘Ass!’ He sprang to his feet and flung his arms around David’s neck, kissing him and pulling him down onto the bed. 

‘Well, my dear, it was the most shameless cast for a compliment I ever heard. And you’re quite the fly fisherman, if you hadn’t noticed.’ He ran his thumb along Frank’s jaw, down his neck into the hollow of his throat. ‘But what I said has the merit of being true, nonetheless. I―I think of pleasant things. Comforts. And you do loom pretty large among those.’ He dipped his head into a long kiss: its proficiency should not have startled Frank, who had lessoned David in more than one pastime only to find himself almost instantly surpassed, but it did. 

‘Would―would this be a comfort?’ Frank asked when he was permitted to surface, reaching down. ‘But don’t―’ he gasped, forestalling David’s immediate reciprocation. ‘I’m on rather a hair-trigger and I’m afraid I shouldn’t last a moment.’ David nodded and sat back on his haunches; the matter of duration, usually so important, meant much less to him, Frank supposed. 

It had been a long time since, in waking imagination, he had let himself think of his hand closing about David’s cock. It was an action that occasionally entered his dreams; but the dream-David was an ardent, wide-eyed being utterly different from this corporeal one, who smiled slackly and, eyelids fluttering, purred a satisfaction wholly animal. Frank could have beaten him. Oh God, he thought, however was he going to explain _that_ under this new dispensation? He could not, he would not, it was simply too unspeakably vile that David should be apprised of that most sordid and commonplace streak in him. It was simply too unspeakably exciting. A screw seemed to turn upon his own arousal; a firm touch from any part of David’s body, at that moment, would have done it, dissolved him at every pore. That form of words somehow recalled a greasy pamphlet of pictures and verses passed hand to hand early in his time at Marchester; disgusting him deeply, it had remained in his possession only long enough to assure him that penetration _per anus_ had precedent of some antiquity, and was not an invention of the notorious set then in the ascendant in Adams's. 

David seemed to perceive some change in the quality of Frank’s attentions and shifted to indicate present satiation. He dropped onto his side and propped his head on his hand, grinning unguardedly. Frank found the absence of frenzy entirely disconcerting, but perhaps this was how it should be, a calm, a rational and philosophical love. He assumed the same posture. 

‘I'd almost forgotten what you look like,’ David confessed. 

Frank, who belonged to the minority of humans for whom such a lapse of memory was inconceivable, and in common with most of them wished he didn’t, shook his head forgivingly. 

‘I felt frightfully guilty, but then when I saw you again tonight, it was all worth it. It was like the first time, when you came tumbling down the stairs. You almost had a―what do you call it, that saints―a nimbus. I’d never seen anyone so vivid, so _delineated_ as you―’ 

Frank’s gut clenched. ‘David, _don’t_.’ 

‘Dearest―why? Oh. Do you know, I barely even remember―he was there. I paint him out, somehow―Frank, what is it? What?’ 

David put his hand on Frank’s shoulder; under the consoling touch, he began to tremble. 

‘Oh, _fucking hell_.’ 

Frank winced, despite everything: he had hoped, ludicrously, never to hear the Army’s most ubiquitous oath on David’s lips. ‘Missing,' he said with what remained to him of composure. 'But there's no doubt.’ 

He wriggled into David’s arms and clung, silently. When David started to nuzzle, then to kiss his neck he responded with the fervour that he had thought dissipated. Fully hard again, he frigged himself against David’s hip and thigh as they rolled together, legs entangled and mouths locked. David turned his head and gasped, ‘What―can I do? What is it you want?’ 

What he _wanted_ , he acknowledged with the total, disembodied clarity of barely-governed lust, was David pale, half-delirious, bruised and bleeding from a birching, thrown on his back with his knees pressed almost to his shoulders, and himself thrust ballock-deep in his arse. This could scarcely be a politic request, and yet for the moment, he had no other, and his jaw moved inarticulately. This David interpreted with a robust and rather worldly perspicacity, and if he had no expertise in the act, on this occasion he needed none. Frank’s vision dimmed and he entered his element, that stung and smarted, soothed and caressed, chilled and burned, that was divine buoyancy and death to drink, that nurtured her little ones and dashed them shrieking against the rocks―his eyes dazzled, he smelt the reek of wrack, the suck and spill of the tide rushed up into his ears, _et les cris des mouettes. La vie est une onde, mais si j’etais roi―_

‘Damn.’ Frank grunted and arched his back. ‘Sorry. I meant to warn―’ 

But David’s eyes were radiant, if watery. He wiped his mouth with the heel of his hand, disorganising his moustache only slightly, but sufficiently to dismiss its prosperous, lobbyish air. ‘You did, actually. Would it be all right to kiss you, or should one wash―’ 

‘Quite all right. Desirable, even. And, er―before you swallow, if you like―I mean, instead of. I tend to think spitting’s mildly poor form, unless you absolutely can’t stand it.’ 

‘God, no. Just a gargle, really. Swallowing sea-water’s much worse.’ 

The taste of his own acrid hackle in David’s mouth made Frank’s cock give a last, feeble, balls-aching jerk. 

‘Do you―can I?’ he asked. 

‘No―unless. I mean. Would it be an awful bore if I slept here tonight?’ David ventured shyly. ‘I’d like to wake up with you there.’ 

‘‘Course. Six-thirty ack emma? You’ll have to disorder your sheets for Mrs P., who has a most distressing bent to punctuality, and the only way to do it convincingly, you know, is actually to spend an hour or two in them.’ Frank reached for his alarm clock, which had been thoughtfully wound by she of the distressing bent before she went home the previous afternoon, having guessed correctly that it was just the sort of thing that command of a company or no command of a company, the young master would never remember to do. 

David nodded wanly. ‘Wouldn’t it be ripping if we didn’t have to?’ 

'Reis glorios,' Frank sang out suddenly, with that lack of reserve or warning which to the properly Anglo-Saxon mind seems not just inconsiderate but unsporting, 

'verais lums e clartatz  
Deus poderos, Senher, si a vos platz,  
Al meu companh siatz fizels aiuda!  
Qu'eu no lo vi, pos la nochs fo venguda,  
Et ades sera l'alba.' 

David shivered and hugged himself. ‘Lor’. That falsetto thing you do is simply uncanny. Hairs on the back of your neck, cold water down your spine and all that.’ 

‘Not sure I could sing that one any other way, actually. Mamée―my grandmother taught it to me, when that I was and a little tiny boy. I haven’t sung it in years.’ 

‘Old French, is it?’ 

‘Provençal. The _langue d’oc_ , you know. Fellow’s been cooling his heels all night because his friend’s, er―being entertained by a girl who’s married to someone else―a jealous fool, so we infer he deserves it―and he’s―the bloke who’s singing, that is―to call _cave_ at dawn so his man can make his getaway before the husband shows. Except the friend decides he’s not leaving her after all, and hang the consequences.’ 

‘The jolly rotter. Sounds like a scrape you’d have to get Bags out of.’ 

‘Really? He struck me as the uxorious type. Jump in, won’t you?’ 

‘I meant,’ David amplified, ‘he’d be the husband.’ He embraced Frank from behind, a distinctly distracting manoeuvre that caused him to mutter an immodest, fricative aspiration.

‘How beastly,’ Frank added aloud. ‘Lot of it about. Can’t say I thought the Philomela flute was the best of omens.’ 

‘No, poor chap.' Frank couldn't tell if he meant Bags or the unlucky Athenian princess, and didn't care. 'Good night.’ 

Frank switched off the bedside light. ‘Good night.’ 

A few moments later David’s voice broke in on the dark. ‘Frank?’ 

‘Mm?’ 

‘Would it be too frightful of me to ask you something?’ 

‘Depends what it is.’ 

He spoke in a mechanical now-or-never babble. ‘If I hadn’t been such an infernal little saint at school, might you have―wanted me, asked me―taught me, I suppose―to do that to you then?’ 

‘Important thing is I didn’t,’ Frank said gruffly, suspecting he knew what David was really asking. ‘But if you must know, I’d have done it to you first. Get you hooked. You see, I really was a beast―worse than that. A moral murderer: a sort of drug-peddler, a blackmailer. Met a fellow once, barrister in civilian life, who said he fixes some system they have so he hasn’t ever to prosecute a defendant who’s accused of doing away with his blackmailer, and quite right―’ 

‘Oh Frank, what rot. Honestly, do dry up, my dear. If there was any pity in it one could call you self-pitying, but there isn’t, though I do believe sometimes you enjoy it. I’m glad you were born an Englishman in the jolly old nineteenth century: what a terrible old Romish monk you might have been, with a cell and hair-shirt and a scourge.’ That was altogether too near the knuckle: an irrepressible shudder ran through his whole body. David, misinterpreting it with his native incorruptness, appended a short row of propitiating kisses to the curve of Frank’s neck and shoulder. ‘Sorry. I’m glad you didn’t. I think I should have been rather repelled, and I wouldn’t be able to love you so well as I do now. But I should still love you.’ 

‘I love you too, David,’ he murmured into the absolving dark. ‘I only ever have.’ 

Frank lay long awake after David’s big limbs had grown heavy―heavier. Then he slept uneasily, dreaming that the clever, ugly captain―what was his name, something Dutch?―had written a sonnet in ninety seconds and challenged him to put it into Greek in under three minutes, except that Frank’s Greek had reverted to the selections-from-Homer stage under the man’s foul, gassed breath. A rescuing shell screamed towards their hut and he woke with a jolt. He lay tense and disoriented for several moments, before David’s soft snorts and naked warmth recalled the events of the previous night. Contemplation upon them could wait. He had a hangover, slight but definite: sour mouth, tightness about the temples. The squat German alarm-clock's radioluminescent dial read twenty-seven minutes past six. 

He flopped over and shook David’s shoulder. 

> Bel companho, la foras als peiros  
>  Me preiavatz qu'eu no fos dormilhos,  
>  Enans velhes tota noch tro al dia.  
>  Era no.us platz mos chans ni ma paria  
>  Et ades sera l'alba.

**Author's Note:**

> The Kipling story is [ The Story of the Gadsbys](http://www.telelib.com/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/StoryGadsbys/index.html), and what 'horrid, nasty May Olger' says is that kissing a man who doesn't wax his moustache is like eating an egg without salt.
> 
> Mrs Maddox says: 'When this filthy war is over, move to a country which is governed by the Napoleonic code,' and replies, 'Don't joke, Francis. For such men as you there is no liberty in England.'
> 
> 'et les cris des mouettes. La vie est une onde, mais si j'etais roi': 'and the gulls' cries. Life is a wave, but if I were king'. Respectively, T.S. Eliot, 'Dans le restaurant' and garbled Swinburne from _Lesbia Brandon_ (the original is meant to be doggerel); and both deliberately anachronistic here.
> 
> Frank sings Giraut de Bornelh's alba, ['Reis Glorios'](http://www.trobar.org/troubadours/giraut_de_bornelh/poem54.php) ([translation](http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/FromDawnToDawn.htm#_Toc246328012), [recording](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zodZqezLtfE)). It's pure self-indulgence having Frank sing countertenor at a period when it was neither profitable or popular, but he and David _are_ canonical glee singers, so if anyone would and could, it might just be a veteran of Mr Crowfoot's eccentric catch-singing group.


End file.
